Both advances in technology and economies of scale have led to the downward trending price of a single unit of non-volatile storage memory. This decreasing price of non-volatile storage memory has led to non-volatile storage memory devices with voluminous amounts of storage capacity becoming affordable to even a non-corporate home user. This affordability has led to an increasing popularity of non-volatile storage memory devices with voluminous amounts of storage capacity.
Besides the increasing affordability of such non-volatile storage memory devices, one of the driving forces for the increasing popularity of non-volatile storage memory devices with voluminous amounts of storage capacity relates to the ease of creating and distributing digital content such as, for example, videos, photographs, presentations, and the like. In addition, an increasing number of people are converting their video/DVD collections into digital format for reasons such as, for example, ensuring longevity of their content, ensuring ease of accessibility to their video/DVD collection over a network, reclaiming storage space taken up by their video/DVD collection, and so forth. Such converted video/DVD collections typically also take up substantial amounts of storage capacity.
In view of the aforementioned, given the ease in creating and distributing digital content which typically takes up substantial amounts of storage capacity, it is evident that non-volatile storage memory devices with voluminous amounts of storage capacity are necessary to store the digital content mentioned in the preceding paragraph.
Unfortunately, voluminous amounts of digital content need to be managed in a proper manner in order to provide a favourable user experience. It would be undesirable if accessing the digital content was inconvenient for the user in relation to, for example, access time, locating of content, and so forth. Furthermore, storage of the content should also be robust to ensure longevity of the stored content. In this regard, it is evident that managing of digital content is essential when dealing with voluminous amounts of digital content.
In addition, it is also unfortunate that when a plurality of non-volatile storage memory devices with voluminous amounts of storage capacity are used, higher amounts of power are consumed as it is necessary for power to be drawn for each of the non-volatile memory devices. This is undesirable as content is typically drawn only from a single non-volatile memory device at any instance in time unless the plurality of non-volatile storage memory devices is set up in a RAID configuration.
The present invention aims to address the issues mentioned in the preceding paragraphs.